Kathmandu, June 22 -- A comic sidekick who only talks about fashion, wears flashy, bright-coloured clothes, and whose identity and sexual orientation is treated as something that can be made fun of. Or a character whose libido is so uncontrollable that they have no ambition in life except to explicitly prey on cisgender, heterosexual people. These are some stereotypical characterisations that have often been employed for queer characters in pop culture movies and television.

Much of such films have the same cookie-cutter archetype of queer characters: people who are just defined by their queer identities or are suffering because of it. But there are some filmmakers and writers who have pushed the envelope and have written and depicted qu...